Slashdot Mirror
Ellen Feiss Interview
An anonymous reader writes "The Wait is over! Ellen Feiss's interview is up! And she really was on drugs, (well, allergy meds.)" She's, like, going to be traumatized about this forever, like.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It seems others are noticing elen feiss's popularity with the geek crowd.
According to Ellen in the interview:
It's kind of a funny story. I'm friends with the son of the director, Errol Morris. I'm friends with his son Hamilton. I went with him after school, him and two of my friends. We didn't think we were going to make ads; we were just going to get the free set food. So we go there, and they're like, "We need a couple more people, so I guess the three of you can make ads." So we all made ads, and me and Hamilton's got picked. I had no idea I was going to do it until I got there.
According to Ellen at Apple's site:
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My Dad has a PC that my sister and I used to use for our homework assignments. One night, I was writing a paper on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole paper just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good paper! I had to cram and rewrite it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed paper wasn't nearly as good, and I blame that PC for the grade I got.
I'm happy to report that my sister and I now share an Apple PowerBook. It's a lot nicer to work on than my dad's PC was, it hasn't let me down once, and my grades have all been really good.
Thanks, Apple.
Ellen Feiss
So which was it - an email to Apple, or a hookup with the director's son?
I have to agree. I run Linux on all my servers, and love it, but OS X on the desktop really rocks.. I haven't had so much fun with my machine (A dual G4 powermac) since my Amiga 1000. It's also quite depressing when I have to work on a windows machine again, but I am very enthousiastic about OS X, it's easy, but if you want to do more complex stuff, that is also very well possible.
Sure win2K and XP are more stable, but after tons of install/uninstalls of apps and programs the thing starts to seriously slow down and munge itself. Since 95 I've had windows corrupt it's own dll's atleast 2x a year on all the systems. This isn't even counting production boxes at work that have mysteriously killed IIS dll's.
The thought of having to tech support my Son's computer is beginning to make me throw up. He already has a skill for crashing win2K and XP by pressing down on a half dozen keys for a minute. Toddlers and young children don't know that microsoft didn't design the keyboard as a ladder or piano. All they know is when I push down on all the keys with my palm, the box makes lots of funny noises. I've seen young children bang on mac keyboards without causing it to lock up hard. Sure the ads are stupid, but many people consider themselves computer challenged. If buying a mac means I don't have to re-install windows on my Son's box 5x times a year, I'm there. I rather not waste 4 hours per install, when I could be doing other things more fun.
Can we please get a slashdot interview with her, so we can ask some questions????
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Back home, my best mate was a massive Mac advocate. When I went round to his house, he'd always show me a Mac advert. He loved the Switch campaign of course. He was always telling people, even strangers, how great Apple hardware was. I used his Mac quite a bit, all my circle of friends used it at least once, many more times for me. Out of my friends who were geeks (about 4 or 5 of us :) they have all installed Linux at some point. Did they all stick with it? No. Andrew tried a live CD but his disk was all NTFS so he was a bit stuck. Ken set it up as a small server to allow net connection sharing (he's now using it also at university). Hugh used it because his brother used it. Even Paul, the huge Mac advocate, has installed it 3 times (he got pissed off at the poor PPC support each time though ;).
Then I moved away from home, I got a job at a research company. It used to be Ministry of Defence research before it was privatised. Inside the department, Linux is slowly taking over. There are about 25 of us who joined together, they are my new friends now. I use Linux on the desktop all the time, several others use it part time (rebooting for games and such). Now Dave is getting interested, he was enthusing to me today about Knoppix (he didn't want to disturb his current setup). The company I work in is full of geeks, some of them not badly off at all.
How many Macs have I seen since I left Paul behind? None. Zilch. Zero. How many Linux boxes? Loads.
It's easy to forget that it appears that MacOS is losing market share, and by Apples own admission a few months ago, Linux has nearly double the desktop market share of OS X. Hard to believe isn't it, but outside of Slashdot, there are millions of people with PCs, who don't like Windows and want to try something different. It's easy to try Linux, it costs nothing, and isn't a huge decision. Install it in an evening, try it, if you don't like it, remove it and go back to Windows. Try again in a year or two.
That last sentance is the crucial one, I've seen lots of people try Linux and go back to Windows. But they always try again. And again. I tried Linux 3 times before dropping Windows.
Bah. Mac running unix might sound like a good thing, but all we're going to end up with is Apple as the new M$ instead. I just think it's a really bad thing for the whole Linux community.
Don't worry :) It's alright, Linux is chugging along just nicely. The Mac isn't, and never was, a realistic proposition for most people. That's why it has 4% of the market (far less if you only count os x machines), when it originally had more like 40%. In much the same way that the PC won out over the Mac in the early/mid 90s because the PC was economically if not technically superior (competition drove down margins, powered massive speed increases and so on), Linux gains from the same effect. The presence of competition is usually beneficial to a market as a whole.
For the small number of geeks that decide to stop kernel hacking in favour of writing a new Cocoa IRC client or whatever, they will be replaced 2 times over by newcomers and business. There aren't any flash adverts about it, but the statistics stand.
...for the quality of education in American schools
:-)
I don't know, really. If you ignore the proliferation of likes, she seemed otherwise well-spoken. And she used the word "bombard" in a sentence, which absolutely floored me. If anything, her Q rating has gone up in my book